Alwil Software Avast Home Edition 4.6
Though the best looking of the free antivirus products, Avast performed the worst.
Tony Bradley
Alwil Software's Avast Home Edition 4.6 is free and sports a slick media-player style interface, but its performance scores were bottom-of-the-barrel.
Rather than adopting the standard console window used by the other antivirus products, Avast's looks like an oddly shaped orb, which you can customize with colorful skins. Some new users may find it a little hard to figure out where features are located, but people already familiar with media players may find the interface refreshing.
Unfortunately, Avast's performance didn't match its appearance. It produced the worst performance scores among the ten products tested for "The New Virus Fighters." Avast performed poorly in heuristics tests, ranking third from the bottom. And its scan times were the slowest a??on average it took more than 13 minutes and 11 seconds to perform a scan of our test PC.
Upshot: The price of zero is hard to beat, but Avast Home Edition's bottom-ranked performance is not.
Tony Bradley
